All the big Wall Street players are due to report profits in the coming three weeks, when staff will also learn the size of their payouts. Morgan Stanley's bonus pot is thought to represent the biggest percentage of its revenues for a decade.

Even so, the data compiled by Mergermarket shows 2009 was not a good year for mergers and acquisitions, with the value and volume of deals down 27% on 2008. The last three months of 2009, however, were the best since the third quarter of 2008 when the banking crisis struck. "Though there is still uncertainty in the markets, there are signs that the momentum will carry into 2010," said the research firm.

The value of deals is still below the peaks registered in 2007 in the months before the credit crunch.

Mergermarket points out that one record was set in 2009 when the number and value of insolvencies reached $95bn – almost equal to the total for the previous four years combined.

There were 543 deals related to insolvency, the same as the number that occurred over the previous three years combined, helped by the sale of assets by car companies General Motors and Chrysler.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were both involved in the biggest deal of 2009, the $63bn takeover by Pfizer of Wyeth, in which Goldman was one of the advisers to Pfizer and Morgan Stanley among those helping Wyeth.

JP Morgan fell from the number one spot it achieved in 2008, to third place in the tables. Otherwise, there was very little movement among the top 10, apart from the arrival of Barclays Capital, the investment banking arm of Barclays. Fresh from its takeover of the Wall Street operations of the collapsed Lehman Brothers, BarCap leapt from 37th place to 8th, after advising on 70 deals with a value of $247bn.